A sankey diagram is a visualization that shows how a quantity flows between stages or categories, with the width of each link proportional to the size of the flow. Nodes represent the states — traffic sources, pipeline stages, budget lines — and the ribbons between them show how much moves from one to another. Because widths are proportional everywhere, you can trace where a total comes from, how it splits, and where it ends up, all in one picture.
When to use a sankey diagram
Sankeys answer “where does it all go?” when the paths branch and merge:
- User journeys. Visitors arrive from organic search, ads, and referrals; some go to the pricing page, some to the docs, some bounce. A sankey shows each path’s actual volume, including routes you didn’t design for.
- Attribution and channel flow. How signups from each acquisition channel distribute across plans, or how leads from each campaign flow into pipeline stages and outcomes.
- Resource and cost flows. Budget flowing from departments into projects, energy from sources into uses, or cloud spend from providers into services.
The sankey’s advantage over a funnel chart is exactly this branching: a funnel assumes one straight path with drop-off, while a sankey shows where the drop-off goes and which alternative routes items take. If people leave checkout and land on the support page, the funnel loses them; the sankey draws the ribbon.
When not to use one
If the flow really is a single ordered sequence — stage 1 to stage 2 to stage 3, with the only exit being “gone” — a funnel chart says the same thing more simply, and its stage-to-stage conversion rates are easier to read than ribbon widths.
The common misuse is overloading the diagram. Sankeys degrade quickly with too many nodes and crossing links: past a couple dozen ribbons the picture becomes spaghetti, and readers can no longer follow any individual path. Group minor categories into an “other” node and cap the number of stages you show. Sankeys are also poor tools for precise comparison — readers can’t judge whether one ribbon is 10% wider than another, so if exact proportions are the point, a stacked bar chart or summary table does it better. And every flow needs the same unit: mixing counts with dollars across links makes the widths meaningless.
Sankey diagrams in Metabase
Metabase has a native sankey chart type. Build a question that returns source–target pairs and a measure for the flow between them — for example, columns for the stage a user came from, the stage they went to, and the count of users — and pick the sankey visualization. Metabase lays out the nodes and draws the proportional links, and you can adjust labels and colors in the chart settings.
Sankeys support drill-through like other Metabase charts, and they can share a dashboard — and its filters — with the funnels and metrics they complement. See the sankey docs for the expected data shape.
Related terms
Further reading
Put it to work
- Marketing funnel dashboard — Dashboard
- Ecommerce conversion funnel dashboard — Dashboard
- Marketing analytics — Overview
